Chapter 153: The Hungarian Front
July 9, 1526
On the fourth of July, just five days prior, Konrad had formally unleashed the entirety of his efficient factory laws upon his newly subjugated vassal lords.
With a single sweep of his pen, the era of independent, leisurely craftsmanship was ripped away... It was replaced by the unrelenting discipline of the assembly line.
The peasantry and local artisans were abruptly transitioned into wage laborers, expected to stand at their designated stations for twelve hours a day, performing a single task until their hands blistered and their muscles screamed in protest.
Simultaneously with the draconian factory decrees, Konrad had mandated a series of lavish, state-funded festivals across all the major territories of Swabia and Bavaria.
He ordered the local vassal lords to open the state-owned breweries, flooding the streets with beer.
The state kitchens churned out mountains of perfectly roasted meats, and the town squares were filled with music, dancing, and overwhelming excess...
By filling their bellies with rich food and their heads with strong drink, Konrad gamified the loyalty of the populace.
The citizens did not focus on the loss of their feudal autonomy or the grueling hours of the new textile mills and blast forges.
Instead, they hailed Konrad as a benevolent god of prosperity, blind to the fact that they had simply traded the chains of serfdom for the economic chains of industrial capitalism.
The reason for this rapid pacification was simple: Konrad was preparing to leave the borders of his unassailable capital to meet with the Holy Roman Emperor, and he needed absolute domestic tranquility in his absence.
News had just arrived from the east that Elizabeth of Austria — the newly born daughter of the Emperor’s brother, Archduke Ferdinand — had entered the world.
To the Habsburg dynasty, the birth of this child was a moment of immense pride, a vital piece of the marriage alliances that would eventually tie their lineage to the crowns of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
They were parading the infant across their diplomatic channels as a symbol of their divine right to rule the continent...
Konrad, however, viewed the birth of the Habsburg princess as nothing more than a fleeting distraction from the true crisis tearing at the Emperor’s throat.
Arriving alongside the joyous birth announcements was a highly classified, desperately penned letter bearing the personal seal of Emperor Charles V.
The Ottoman Empire, marching under the banners of Suleiman the Magnificent, had launched a terrifyingly massive invasion straight into the heart of Hungary.
The Hungarian King was woefully unprepared to face the relentless tide of the east, and Emperor Charles V was effectively begging his rebellious, newly minted King of Alemannia for immediate military intervention.
The Emperor’s letter pleaded for Konrad to march his 7,000 soldiers and his devastating Gatling carts eastward to halt the Ottoman advance and save the Hungarian front.
Konrad had read the letter with a smirk...
The Ottomans fielded tens of thousands of elite Janissaries and heavily armored Sipahi cavalry —forces that possessed the sheer numbers and discipline to effortlessly crush the traditional, disorganized knights of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Emperor fully recognized that only Konrad’s industrialized "pike and shot" formations possessed the concentrated firepower necessary to withstand the eastern tide.
...
Now, on the morning of July 9, before he finalized the extortionate diplomatic strategy he would unleash upon the Emperor, Konrad stood inside the heavily guarded, subterranean engineering vault of the Augsburg palace.
The walls were lined with massive chalkboards, covered in mathematical formulas and metallurgical ratios.
Gathered around a table at the center of the vault were his top engineers: the seasoned Master Ulrich, and a recently promoted forge master named Johann.
Konrad did not call them here to discuss the Ottoman invasion; he called them here to discuss the mechanical means by which the Kingdom of Alemannia would dominate the upcoming conflict...
"The Emperor is going to demand our artillery to stall the Ottomans," Konrad stated flatly. "But as I have previously decreed, we will never sell the Gatling carts or the grooved rifles to a foreign power. We maintain a monopoly on rapid-fire ballistics. We will, however, sell the Emperor our heavy field cannons. But if we are to mass-produce these weapons rapidly enough to supply the Hungarian front and drain the Emperor’s coffers, our current casting methods are too slow and primitive."
Konrad reached into his satchel and unfurled a detailed blueprint across the table.
Master Ulrich and Johann leaned in, their eyes widening.
"This, gentlemen," Konrad announced, "is a water-powered, horizontal cannon-boring mill."
Historically, cannons in this primitive era were cast hollow around a fragile clay core.
It was a deeply flawed, agonizingly slow process that resulted in uneven barrel walls, frequent misfires, and catastrophic metallurgical failures that often exploded and killed the artillery crews operating them.
"From this day forward, the state-owned foundries of Alemannia will no longer cast hollow cannons," Konrad dictated. "We will cast the bronze and iron cannons as solid, uniform blocks of metal. Once the block is cooled and the structural integrity is absolute, we will mount it onto this carriage."
He traced the intricate system of heavy iron gears and the mechanized drill bit detailed on the blueprint.
"The machine will be directly powered by the water wheels we are constructing along the Lech River," Konrad explained.
"The force of the river will continuously turn the solid cannon barrel against a fixed, incredibly hardened steel drill bit."
"By boring the hole out of a solid block of metal, the interior of the barrel will be perfectly smooth, perfectly straight, and perfectly uniform."
"Less windage means the explosive force of the gunpowder is not wasted leaking around the sides of the shot."
"The cannons we sell the Emperor will fire significantly farther and hit with vastly more force than anything the Ottomans have ever encountered."
"And because the boring process is entirely mechanized, we can produce them ten times faster..."
"It is a miracle, Sire," Master Ulrich breathed, tracing the lines of the water-wheel linkage on the parchment.
Konrad nodded, rolling the blueprint back up and sliding it into a tube. "I want the prototypes constructed and operational within the month. Divert as much silver from the treasury as you require. When I ride out to meet Emperor Charles V, I will promise him a supply of our finest artillery . He will pay me a fortune to build these weapons, and when his war with the Ottomans is finally over, you gentlemen will live in luxury."
As the two artisans bowed and scurried from the vault to begin their task, Konrad finally allowed a sigh to escape his lips.
He retired to his private, guarded chambers within the Augsburg palace. Stripping off his gold-embroidered, dark-grey military uniform, he washed the grime of the foundries from his face with purified water.
He did not visit Queen Katarina, who was still resting with the newborn Crown Prince, nor did he seek out Isolde’s warmth. He simply collapsed onto his mattress, closing his eyes and allowing his mind to finally shut down.
...
When the time finally came to answer Emperor Charles V’s desperate summons, Konrad marched with a display of terror.
Konrad rode at the head of a highly specialized column, flanked by five hundred of his elite Ironstorm Jaegers.
Behind the infantry rolled twelve reinforced wagons carrying his proprietary Gatling carts, their multiple rotating barrels concealed beneath heavy canvas tarps.
Their destination was the fortified Imperial city of Speyer, situated along the vital trade arteries of the Rhine River.
It was here, within the sprawling, ancient stone walls of the city, that Emperor Charles V had convened an emergency Imperial Diet to desperately coordinate the failing defense of Hungary against the invading Ottoman hordes, while attempting to placate the fractured religious factions tearing his empire apart from the inside.
As Konrad’s mechanized column crossed the borders of his newly consolidated territories and entered the Emperor’s lands, the stark contrast between the two realms became glaringly obvious.
The Habsburg domains were vast, but administratively pathetic...
Konrad observed the unpaved dirt roads, the starving peasant levies gathering in the fields, and the arrogant, individualistic banners of the minor lords who refused to cooperate with one another.
It was a dying, obsolete system, and Konrad intended to profit from its inevitable collapse.
While riding at a measured pace, Konrad was not blind to the vipers waiting for him in Speyer. His intelligence network had been working overtime...
A courier pigeon had arrived just hours before, carrying a heavily encrypted missive from one of the "Speakers" deeply embedded within the Emperor’s court.
Konrad retrieved the small strip of decoded parchment from his satchel, reading it over as his massive Swabian warhorse trotted along the riverbank.
He wanted to know exactly who currently insulated the Emperor.
According to Isolde’s spies, Charles V was surrounded by a desperate, sycophantic inner circle of Austrian archdukes and arrogant Spanish infantry commanders.
These traditionalist men despised Konrad...
They viewed the King of Alemannia as a low-born Swabian upstart, a rebel who had usurped the Bavarian Duke and manipulated his way into royalty through brute force and unholy witchcraft.
More importantly, these men were terrified.
They knew their heavy cavalry and smoothbore arquebuses were useless against the Ottoman Janissaries, and it severely bruised their fragile aristocratic egos to rely on Konrad’s advanced artillery.
Konrad folded the parchment and tucked it safely back into his coat.
When traditional nobles realized they could not defeat an opponent on the battlefield, and could not outmaneuver him in the economy, they invariably resorted to the coward’s arithmetic: assassination.
If the Emperor’s forces foolishly attempted to arrest him, the Ironstorm Jaegers would form a firing line and the Gatling carts would turn the Imperial courtyard into a slaughterhouse in under sixty seconds.
What Konrad held a mild apprehension for was poison...
It was the classic, undetectable weapon of the court.
A few drops of arsenic or cantarella in a goblet of fine wine, or a dusting of hemlock on a plate of roasted venison, and the grand architect of the revolution would die choking on his own blood, leaving his newborn dynasty to crumble into ash.
Konrad turned his head slightly, locking eyes with his Quartiermeister, who rode just a few paces behind him.
Konrad had strictly forbidden his envoy from consuming a single drop of water or a crumb of bread provided by the Habsburg hosts.
The Alemannian supply wagons were heavily loaded with their own state-subsidized, cured rations.
They carried their own kegs of beer and their own ceramic water filtration systems.
Konrad’s personal meals would be exclusively prepared by his own fiercely loyal chef, under the constant, unblinking supervision of two armed guards from his inner circle.
Furthermore, Konrad carried his own set of pure silver cutlery...
While the medieval myth that silver instantly turned black in the presence of any poison was scientifically flawed, he had utilized his advanced chemical knowledge to coat the silverware in a specific, proprietary reagent.
This chemical compound would immediately react and tarnish upon contact with the heavy metals and deadly alkaloids commonly used in contemporary assassinations.
As a final layer of security, Konrad reached his hand inside the breast of his uniform, his fingers brushing against the steel of a weapon that did not exist anywhere else in the world.
It was a compact, double-barreled percussion cap pistol, custom-machined to his exact specifications by the finest gunsmiths in Augsburg.
If the theater devolved and the Emperor’s Spanish sycophants attempted to strike him down with blades in the throne room, Konrad was fully prepared to put a lead ball between Charles V’s eyes before the guards could even draw their swords...
He was walking into a den of cornered vipers, but he was unconcerned.